We do not use the business model of taking annual fees from advertisers to allow their ads (and trackers for confirmation) to pass unblocked. Our business model does not couple our ad and flat fee based revenue to which ads we block.

We do use some of the filter rules that are associated with “Acceptable Ads” to block known-bad domains and URL patterns; and to block and clean up after HTML-native ads.

Why build a browser and not extensions for top browsers?

Extensions face API and performance limits. Additionally, popular extension stores often host malicious counterfeit extensions, which have lead to millions of infected users. Building our own browser lets us put our best foot forward on matters of speed and privacy. We may do extensions if our users find themselves browsing in other browsers often.

Why aren’t you using Mozilla’s Gecko engine on laptops?

We were, under a partially sandboxed, multi-process architecture called Graphene. But we did a careful head-to-head comparison and by every measure, Electron/chromium won.

How do you relieve concerns that you are spyware?

We use all-open source, and we welcome help in auditing our source and verifying our binaries on Debian Linux (verified binaries provably derive from a given version of open source). See https://brendaneich.com/2014/01/trust-but-verify/ for more on verified builds.

Beyond this lower-level auditing, we will need partners to believe in our anonymous ad attribution and conversion confirmation system. More on this as we build it out in near-term milestones on the road to Brave 1.0.

Will you standardize your intent-casting protocol?

We intend to when multiple partners in different regions have helped shake it out. It’s a capital mistake to standardize prematurely, so we must first innovate, deploy, and learn.

Are all ads blocked or can users allow some or all?

Floral World Women's Lace Gold Skater Fabric Dress Shopaholics Ads and trackers are blocked by default. You can allow ads and trackers in the preferences panel. Later, as mentioned above, Brave will let you opt into receiving a reduced ad load that comes without trackers, maintains your privacy and helps support the publishers you like.

Where will the ads in Brave’s new system come from? In what way is this an improvement?

Shopaholics World Skater Floral Gold Dress Fabric Women's Lace In 2016, Brave introduced proposal for a private and anonymous third-party ad-replacement system. We are pleased that it generated an informed and vital debate regarding the problem of uncontrolled trackers and ad exchanges, which in the worst cases spread malware through unaware publishers.

Skater Dress Fabric World Floral Shopaholics Women's Lace Gold In 2017, we are focusing on the Basic Attention Token (BAT), and the ecosystem that it will enable, offering users and publishers a better way to fund the Web. With BAT (along with staking users with a share of tokens), Brave will work to offer privately-matched, anonymously-verified ads. Users can opt-into this.

Brave is working with verified publishers (hundreds of whom have already joined via publishers.brave.com) to help generate greater revenue per user than they receive from today’s broken ad-tech ecosystem.

The blog post mentions that ads are targeted based on browser-side intent signals. What are these signals?

As mentioned above, the browser knows almost everything you do. It knows what sites you visit, how much time you spend on them, what you look at, what is visible “above the fold” and not occluded by opaque layers, what searches you make, what groups of tabs you open while researching major purchases, etc.

Only the browser, after HTTPS terminates and secure pages are decrypted, has all of your private data needed to analyze user intent. Our auditable open source browser code protects this intent data on the client device. Our server side has no access to this data in the clear, nor does it have decryption keys. We do not run a MitM proxy or VPN service.

We provide signals to the browser to help it make good decisions about what preferences and intent signals to expose to maximize user, publisher and advertiser value. Each ad request is anonymous, and exposes only a small subset of the user’s preferences and intent signals to prevent “fingerprinting” the user by a possibly unique set of tags.

What might you use the anonymized history data for?

We have no plans to use aggregated history data for ads. There’s too much risk of re-identification via data leakage. Anything we build that might use differential privacy for other than crash and fault reporting will require a separate opt-in by the Brave user, and entail a greater revenue share via theBAT.

While we will block third-party cookies where you have no first-party relationship with the cookie’s domain, we don’t block first party cookies by default. However, the Brave user will have the option to selectively block/enable cookies globally or on a site-by-site basis. Google will only have the ability to track you within their own domain and they won’t be able to use that information to target you outside of google.com.

As earlier answers explain, we do not even have access to identifiable user data. The anonymized aggregated ad campaign related data we do collect is used for accounting and reporting, but this data cannot be mapped back to devices or user identities of any kind.

Is Brave Software Hiring?

We are actively seeking individuals who share our vision for a more private, safe, and secure web. To view current positions, visit our Jobs page. Applicants are encouraged to apply directly―not by means of a recruiter or other representation.